


Eighty-Five

by Mnemosyne_Elegy



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Creative Mathing, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 15:10:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16410842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mnemosyne_Elegy/pseuds/Mnemosyne_Elegy
Summary: Somehow, L's percentages never seemed to quite add up. If everything Light says and does makes L even more certain that he's a murderer, then why aren't the percentages getting higher?





	Eighty-Five

"It's nearly three in the morning," Light said meaningfully.

"So it is," replied L with that expressionless drawl of his. His eyes skimmed along the computer screen at a rapid rate, and he didn't so much as glance over at the disruption or acknowledge the point he must know Light was trying to make.

Light sighed in defeat. "I'm pretty sure you're not human and that's why you don't have to sleep, but I haven't been able to sleep properly in days."

He jangled the chain of the cuffs binding them together pointedly, and managed to elicit exactly no reaction from L.

"There is a perfectly comfortable chair right there."

Which was not the point, and Light knew that L was being deliberately obtuse. As per usual. He groaned and wriggled into a more comfortable position in the chair, glancing over the bank of monitors wearily. Everyone else had retired long before, and all he wanted to do was join them.

"Come on, can't we just go to bed? I'm exhausted and you haven't slept more than a few hours in the past week. Don't you want to get some sleep?"

"I'll sleep when I'm dead," L said flatly, and the  _'and that will be sooner rather than later'_  was so strongly implied that Light could almost hear it echoing in his ears.

"Not this again," Light said, tiredness creeping into his voice. "I don't want to kill anyone. I just want to go to sleep."

"Seventeen percent," muttered L, his gaze never straying from the report on the screen.

"Seriously, Ryuzaki?" Light burst out in frustration.

"Nineteen point five."

Light scowled and crossed his arms, making the chain rattle noisily. It was so frustrating that L always regarded him with such suspicion, insisting that he was a killer. How could he be a killer if he couldn't remember ever killing anyone? It was ridiculous.

Although… He had to admit that there were some things that didn't quite match up in his memory, some things that felt like they'd been cobbled together after the fact, some things that might be missing. He didn't want to tell L or the others that, of course, given that he was already under suspicion. Something wasn't quite right, and L wouldn't be suspicious without good reason. But as much as Light respected L and his deductive abilities, he didn't want to believe that the detective might somehow be right.

"There's something wrong with your percentages," he said instead of voicing any concerns. "I'm pretty sure you said I was at twenty-three yesterday, and I've been hovering right around the eighteen mark for nearly a week. I highly doubt that I have allayed any of your suspicions, yet the number is stagnating and fluctuating around the same point. You are spouting incorrect percentages."

L didn't look away from the screen, but his hand reached out blindly until his fingers closed around one of the sugar cubes waiting in a nearby dish. He began absently stacking them one on top of the other, his fingers nimble with practice despite the seemingly awkward motions.

"Correct," he said.

"…And?"

"And what?"

"What are the correct ones, then?"

L flicked the top sugar cube and the entire stack collapsed. "Are you quite sure that you want to hear them?"

"Yes," said Light, even though he was sure of no such thing.

"There is a ninety-seven percent chance that you were Kira. The original Kira, to be exact." L's thumb worked at his lip as it often did when he was thinking, and then dipped inside his mouth so that he could chew on the tip. "I am very confident of it. I just lack adequate evidence to convince everyone else beyond a shadow of a doubt."

An uncomfortable feeling squirmed in the pit of Light's stomach. That was so  _high_. L sounded so  _sure_. Light had known L was just about convinced of this, but hearing such a high percentage after getting used to hearing things around the eighteen percent mark…

"But–"

"But there is also a seventy percent chance that you are no longer Kira and do not retain the memories of being Kira," L continued as if he hadn't heard the disruption. "I do not know how this is possible and am hesitant to commit to such an odd assumption, and yet I can see the difference when I look in your eyes. Your eyes are different from before. I can even pinpoint the exact moment they changed, towards the beginning of your confinement, right around the time you started protesting your innocence. I find this troubling."

Light stared at L, his mind whirling, the only sound the faint noise of the mouse scrolling up and down the page that the detective no longer seemed to be reading. This was not a new suspicion, any more than Misa possibly having been the second Kira was new, but the frustrated confusion underlying L's otherwise flat voice was something he rarely displayed.

"Yeah…" Light shook his head. "But I don't see how that would even be possible… I can't imagine being Kira."

L was silent for a long time. His fingers were pale in the bright light of the computer screen as he scrolled down the page and clicked to the next. And clicked to the next. The next. The next.

Light watched in worried bemusement. L's movements were usually very calculated, his gaze sharp behind that veneer of blank dullness in his eyes as he searched everything for clues, but now he was just clicking through pages of reports aimlessly, his eyes unseeing.

"Are you–?"

"There is a ninety percent chance that this will be my last case," L said abruptly. The thumb between his teeth received a particularly nasty bite. "And there is an eighty-two percent chance that you will be the one to kill me."

Light's heart skipped a beat before restarting with a painful thud, and there was that fleeting worry that he was Kira's next victim until the rhythm steadied again. "I won't–"

"I think you were right, that if you managed to somehow transfer Kira's powers to someone else, you would have arranged for them to come back around to you eventually. You think it is unfair that I treat you as if you are Kira, that I prod at you with percentages and barbed comments, and perhaps you are right. But… I was not lying that I consider you to be possibly the closest thing to a friend I have ever had—even though you were almost certainly a murderer at the time—but sometimes it is difficult to overlook the fact that I fully expect you to try killing me within the next few months."

Light bit down on his lip as he watched L cease his mindless clicking and return to reading through the report as if nothing had just happened. How could he say all of that with such an expressionless face and dull eyes?

"Are you afraid?" Light asked, the words tumbling out of his mouth before he could stop them.

L's finger slipped from between his teeth to rub thoughtfully along his lower lip again. "No, not exactly. And yet, I do not want to die, either."

Light swallowed hard, and that tight ball of resentment he'd been feeding every time L threw out one of his Kira percentages unwound and began slowly withering away. As frustrating as it was to have accusations constantly thrown at him, he couldn't imagine being quite literally chained to the person you were so sure was going to kill you, having to work side by side with them on the very case that was supposed to catch them.

He wondered what had so strongly convinced L that he was going to die.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly.

L looked over for the first time, gray eyes gleaming dully in the light from the computers. "Why? The Kiras have shown all the hallmarks of being sociopaths, so I highly doubt that you will feel sorry about killing me."

"No, if that was true, I probably wouldn't," Light admitted. "But right now I am, and I'll apologize while I can feel sorry."

L stared at him, face blank and eyes entirely unreadable. Then he uncurled himself from that horribly uncomfortable-looking hunched-over position of his and ambled over to a nearby table. Picking up the laptop there, he started for the door. Light trailed after him, mindful of the chain linking them together.

L walked straight for their bedroom while Light tried to bore into the back of his skull with his eyes and figure out what was going on inside that brilliant yet incomprehensible mind, and then resumed his scrunched-up sitting position on the edge of the bed. He booted up the laptop and motioned for Light to go around to the other side of the bed.

"I suppose you might as well sleep," he said without emotion, his eyes already fixed on the screen. "Your logical reasoning abilities decrease by nearly thirty percent without at least four hours of sleep, and we will need you awake and functioning in the morning. It must be inconvenient to need so much sleep to keep your abilities sharp."

"Everyone needs sleep to keep their abilities sharp," Light muttered as he gratefully sank onto the bed and pulled the covers up.

"I can function on much less sleep than you, apparently."

Light couldn't deny that. The raccoon-like circles under L's eyes didn't seem to wreck his brain any.

Light closed his eyes against the glow of the laptop and listened to the faint clicking of the keys and occasional tap of the mouse. It was a relief to finally be allowed to sleep in an actual bed, and he wondered absently if it was meant to be a small gesture of gratitude or understanding or something like that. Or just another test of some kind. It was hard to tell with L.

"I'm not Kira," Light mumbled around a yawn as he flipped over to face the other direction and snuggled deeply into the blankets. "We make an odd pair and you can be dreadfully annoying, but I think you're one of my few friends as well. We have too much in common not to be. I'm not going to kill you, Ryuzaki."

L said nothing, and Light gave up on expecting a response and let drowsiness overtake him. As he finally slipped into sleep, he could have almost sworn that the last thing he heard was the faintest of sighs whispering, "Eighty-five."

**Author's Note:**

> L was honestly the only character I really cared about. He was interesting and I liked his moral ambiguity. So I sort of lost interest in the series halfway through when it went all weird, but it was interesting enough.


End file.
